Watching Sherlock Holmes

July 24, 1988

Sherlock Holmes is a back on Public Broadcasting System's Mystery Theater, and for drama and suspense, this series, "The Return of Sherlock Holmes, " is the most effective hour of nonsense on TV during this summer season of re-runs and sriters' strike.

Nonsense?  Certainly.  In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle introduced one of the earliest , and certainly most long-lived, private eyes to the world.  Holmes, who prefers to call himself an "unofficial consulting detective," has the singular ability to solve crimes that baffle others, including the police and his fictional chronicler, Dr. Watson.  And he uses two tools in his pursuit of truth:  meticulous observation and inductive reasoning.

One cannot fault the former:  the ability to find footprints, to analyse smoking tobacco, to spot the unusual hidden amongst the ordinary, these are qualities we visualize as being essential to the police (or private op) work.  The man is an authority on criminal behavior and the detection of such, and thanks to Doyle's convincing portrayal of Holmes as hard-working , hard-studying, totally dedicated expert, we accept this foundation with little problem.

The problem lies in Holmes' use of infallible induction, the idea that one can reason from the particular to the general as a precisely as one can deduce from the general to the particular.  Deduction, which is what we did in high school geometry, postulates certain rules of existence and creates propositions from them in a closed, knowable system.  All mathematics and logic work in this way.

Induction does the same thing backwards, but because the rules are only partly knowable, and the elements, except for those in front of one's face are unknown, the creation of general propositions is problematic.  Science uses inductive reasoning, and is a constant process of theorizing, finding that some observation does not support that theory, and then refining the theory, or coming up with another.  "Conjecture and Refutation" is what Carl Popper calls science in his book of the same name, and Homes' conceit that such reasoning will lead to irrefutable conclusions is just plain wrong.

What confuses the Holmes reader is that Holmes often calls "induction" "deduction," and when things go wrong, he blames himself for not thinking of possibilities that we know are infinite.  In "A Study in Scarlet," Holmes states that "From a drop of water,...a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.  So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it."  Well, perhaps one could infer the possibility of it, but the Truth of an Atlantic or a Niagara cannot be inferred, it must be observed.

So given the false premise upon which the Homes tales are based, what is their appeal?  It has to be plot and character, and it has to be that the false theme is so appealingly written that it doesn't matter that it is nonsense.

How's that for inductive reasoning?

Sherlock Holmes has been on the screen at least since 1903, but it wasn't 'till the sound era that he came into his own, and not  until the 1939remake of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," starring Basil Rathbone as Homes, was the character truly defined for the screen.  Unfortunately the Rathbone series, featuring the wonderful Nigel Bruce as Watson, portrayed Watson as a bumbling idiot, hardly the sort of person to chronicle Holmes' adventures.

In 1984, England's Granada TV started a series of one-hour adventures, and that is what PBS's Mystery Theater is showing now.  Homes fans, and those who don't know him at all, will not be disappointed.  The Victorian era of rich and poor, of elegance and squalor, of the traditional and the modern, is nicely captured.  The production values, the use of camera and lighting, are more like those of cinema than of TV series.  The series looks lush and expensive.

And the characters, ah, what characters.  Jeremy Brett plays the title protagonist with a delicacy and a humanity denied Rathbone's Holmes.  Rathbone is less sympathetic and more brusque, perhaps more correct to Doyle's original, but such a man unrelentingly cerebral and impossibly cruel, comes across the printed page better than the screen.  Brett's character is also cruel, but he can regret, at least for an instant, his thoughtlessness to his fellows.  In other respects, he is all you'd expect: austere, tall, clever-minded, a master at what he does.

Edward Hardwicke, who was not a member of the original cast of this series, brings intelligence and common sense to his Watson.  No fool he, he simply lacks the ability to observe and induce as Holmes does.

And what truly brings the shows together, aside from fine plotlines and decent puzzles is the relationship between these two friends, for friends they are.  Holmes guides Watson through his own specialty as a good teacher would guide a student, but Watson is Holmes' connection with the rest of the world, including us.

Mystery Theater plays on Thursday Evening at 9 p.m. on WMHT Ch. 17, and Vermont ETV, Ch.  79, and at 3 p.m. Sunday on Ch. 13.

Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.